I am the last patron to the Netflix table.  I have a rather large DVD collection and I work in a movie theater.  Why pay for more viewing options that I do not need?

Well, I had all this extra time this month…

Remember back in the Blockbuster days?  They would sell you this fancy pass where you could rent as many titles as you wanted for a week.  You could check out several movies at a time.  If I had a break from school, I would take advantage.  I would catch up on all the movies.  Twenty years later, I embraced the same notion.

These numbers are a bit much, but the truth is the truth.  Seven comedy specials.  Twenty-four movies.  One hundred and seventy episodes.  Yeah, I know.  I consume a fair chunk of television in my normal life.  And I still manage to read comics and go through my usual book a week.  However this was an awful lot of tablet screen time.

Making a Murderer paired with Dead to Me were far too depressing.  I felt my mood plummet after each installment.  Happily, I had Conan without Borders to make me laugh.  Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee was funny until you watch enough episodes and realize that there are a lot of things in the world they do not like.

It does not appear Netflix imposes time limits on their movies.  Bird Box stretched on a bit.  The Two Popes was great but you could feel the run time.  And The Irishman?  So very long.

Netflix really wanted me to watch Becoming.  I try not to be political, so I was in go great rush.  I had not read Michelle Obama’s book.  Still, the e-mail and screen prompts were prevalent.

Then I saw that Romney had his own documentary.  So, in an effort to be fair, I watched both.  (I called it Becoming Mitt.)

What struck me was how they are combatants, but they have almost everything in common.  They have the audacity to think that they can set the country right.  They have spouses that do everything to get elected.  Mitt Romney’s wife has M.S.  So did Michelle Obama’s dad.  Both want their families to try to be normal.  Romney picked up trash with his kids and Obama made sure her kids cleaned up their rooms.  Both were seen praying and talking to God.  He was labeled as a flip-flopper.  She was seen as a terrorist.  More things unite them than separates them.  They should sit down together and watch My Fellow Americans and Wag the Dog together.  Neither of which are on Netflix.

Honestly, that was the biggest letdown for me.  There were not that many movies I wanted to see.  Oh, they have hundreds of movies.  I can spend months watching their movies.  But movies I would have a date night around?  Movies that I would add to my collection?  No.

That is the trouble with these platforms.  I had Amazon Prime for a bit and ran into the same trap.  It is far too easy to watch, “something”.  Not something you want, not something you have been waiting for; just any old thing.  Before you know it you have spent ten hours a week watching movies that you could not care less about.  Then we wonder how our week flew by so fast and why we do not have more free time.

Seven hours of comedy stand-up sessions.  Forty-eight hours of movies.  Episodes can be any length they want, but if we round to about thirty minutes each, that puts me at eighty-five hours.  Almost four days watching episodes alone.  I gave Netflix seven days; all in less than a month.  Oy.

Now, without spending any more months or money invested in all this, I can walk away clean.  I can once again allocate time to movies I know I will enjoy.  I can say that I tried Netflix and went on with my life.

We only have so many hours in our lives.  Scrolling through lists of movies available?  That is not how I want to spend that time.